I have been loving this blog because the writer is both a chronic illness patient -and- an occupational therapy student. So she has experience and perspective from both sides of the patient-provider street.

"the consumer’s use of an app to store, manage and possibly even transmit data to a covered entity does not by itself make the app developer subject to HIPPA compliance."

"Therefore, it becomes extremely important for app developers to determine who their clients are and if they are covered entities, and if their app creates, receives, maintains or transmits identifiable information. "

I have all sorts of questions about potential liability for independent groups that create health apps...

I am better at many things than I was when I started my journey to become a physician more than a decade ago. But I am not sure that understanding patients as people — and placing them in the context of their long, messy, beautiful lives — is one of them.

Doctors are trained first to diagnose, treat and fix — and second, to comfort, palliate and soothe. The result is a slow loss of vision, an inability to see who and what people are outside the patient we see in the hospital.

Nobody has asked the fundamental question, “Can you show me how all this helps my patients?” It is a sad situation when physicians, highly trained in the art and science of healing, are forced to become data entry clerks (no offense to clerks) and secretaries (again I don’t intend to offend secretaries either). But how can we care for patients when we are forced to do things we did not train for nor are good at? Why is nobody asking patients how all these changes to a physician’s responsibility has changed a patient’s perception of their relationship with their doctor?

Good perspective on the doctor-side frustrations of appointments and patient-tracking.